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Sunlight Before Signing in Obama’s First Term

“Sunlight Before Signing” was President Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to put all bills Congress sent him online for five days before signing them. It was a measurable promise that I’ve monitored here since the beginning of his first term, and I will continue to do so in his second.

It was the president’s first broken promise, and in the first year he broke it again with almost every new law, giving just six of the first 124 bills he signed the exposure he promised.

With his first term concluded last month, we can now assess how well the president did with Sunlight Before Signing. Compliance with the promise got better, but it’s still not great. The president gave 413 of 665 bills five days of public review (and one he acceptably did not give five days due to emergency).

Would five days of public review have magically produced transparent government? Of course not. But imagine if the president had implemented and enforced his five-day promise from the beginning, and with every law.

Some segments of the public would have developed an expectation that bills slated to become law were available in a single place for their review and comment. That would have produced a small, but important, increment of transparency and public oversight of government.

Whether implemented in Congress or at the White House, a “hold” on final passage of legislation would have changed the “upstream” behavior of legislators not wanting to be caught inserting earmarks or parochial amendments that could take down a bill. Without Sunlight Before Signing in the first year, and with sunlight withheld from key bills, that blend of government process amenable to oversight and public capacity for oversight has not materialized. So we labor on, without the sunlight we could have had.

In a way, Sunlight Before Signing is emblematic of the president’s transparency efforts overall. They have had the form of transparency, but not the substance. This is not for lack of interest or effort. In my paper, “Publication Practices for Transparent Government,” I documented some of the efforts the Obama Administration leveled at transparency, especially in the first half of his first term. The paper was intended to help the transparency community better communicate to governments what it is we want.

But the challenge of producing transparent government coincided with fading urgency, as the Obama Administration collectively got comfortable with power. Transparency is the demand of the outsider, and the incentive structures predict that a presidential administration will walk away from transparency promises as it recognizes that transparency produces constraints on action.

So I feel justified in giving the transparency mantle to the House of Representatives in my paper “Grading the Government’s Data Publication Practices.” After promising great transparency strides, the Obama administration has faltered. The House promised less, and controls far fewer organs of government, but it has delivered modest gains. I often have credited House Republicans—they do control the House—but House Democrats support transparency, and they deserve credit for participating in the House’s forward movement.

I’ve seen few signs that any important forward motion on transparency is coming from the administration. But the president can always produce transparency progress in short order by making it a priority. Publish well-structured data going to the heart of transparency: the deliberations, management, and results of the executive branch of government.

A deal is on the table (because, oh yes, favorable bloggy-blogs from Jim Harper are a huuge bargaining chip): If I get a machine-readable federal government organization chart, the Sunlight Before Signing thing is forgotten.

In the meantime, here is the president’s Sunlight Before Signing compliance, law by law, for everything sent his way by the 112th Congresses.